From tomorrow until Sunday, LUBUNYA Dispatches, an initiative from Turkey in solidarity
with LGBTQ+ communities, takes over the ICA for our monthly curated film series Screen
Practices!
Turkey is a unique spatial-temporal context to understand the development, and more recently the regression, of lubunya emancipatory politics and discourse; both in localized and globalized reams. Legally, the Republic never criminalised homosexuality in the country’s formative constitution, meaning that lubunya communities historically enjoyed a level of legislative sexual and gendered freedom throughout the 20th century ill-afforded to its European and North American counterparts until much later.
That withstanding, lubunya in contemporary Turkey have been unfavourably positioned against the hegemonic politics of the Turkish state. Particularly under the current leadership of the President Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP), projects of neoliberalisation have circulated that are rife with a dogma of religious moralisation to present lubunya communities as a pathological danger to the political, societal and economic advancement of Turkey. As a result, lubunya have been increasingly subjected to extreme forms of violence and oppression in Turkey; last year alone saw a record-breaking number of arrests during Istanbul Pride march in June, and the “Big Family Gathering” that took place in September 2022, attended by 150 conservative non-governmental organisations across Turkey, calling on the government to close down all LGBTQ+ associations.
This intervention, titled LUBUNYA Dispatches, aims to draw solidarity and attention to such developments in Turkey by platforming the resistances that continue to persist despite such regressions. For its iteration at the ICA, LUBUNYA Dispatches presents a film programme and a series of off-events in the form of workshops and panels that construct dialogues among LGBTQI+ communities and our allies, unpacking the hierarchies and relationships of power that exist between the State, and the People.
Curatorial text by Erkan Affan
A curated selection of performance videos will also be showcased at the ICA for the duration of LUBUNYA Dispatches. Featuring work by Kübra Uzun, Harun Guler, Istanbul Queer Art Collective, and Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu.
For the whole program:
https://www.ica.art/films/lubunya-dispatches
